But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

Actually, I thought that my own were true sentences. The publishers did not.

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

Unless of course even he didn't grasp it.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

That tells us just enough to imagine that we know what it means.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

In fact why did they make the sea itself so cruel? Or the land for that matter.

My big fish must be somewhere.

Probably right around the corner from your one true love.

The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals.

Tell that to the folks at PETA.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.

That explains why so many actors want to be musicians. What explains why so many musicians want to be actors?

Facts just twist the truth around.

Much as when truth just twists the fact around.

This kind of compartmentalizing—separating one’s livelihood from one’s social aspirations—is part of the reason David Koch, the hidden hand behind a lot of ultraconservatives and, reportedly, the Tea Party movement in the United States, transforms himself into a respected arts patron by funding a theater at Lincoln Center, or why at Swiss bank that helps U.S. depositors avoid paying taxes generously supports symphony halls and the ballet. It’s almost as if there are moral scales, and by tossing some loot on one side, you can balance out the precarious situation your reputation might be getting into on the other.

That's how it works alright.

You might say that the universe plays the blues.

You might all the more when it shits on you.

It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices.

Well, it could be true.

Around 1900, according to music writer Alex Ross, classical audiences were no longer allowed to shout, eat, and chat during a performance.2 One was expected to sit immobile and listen with rapt attention. Ross hints that this was a way of keeping the hoi polloi out of the new symphony halls and opera houses.

Well, it could be true.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

I've come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority.

That's what Don Trump is for. To fuck that up too.

Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice.

One genre in particular: objectivism

The real curriculum is punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony, those skills we shall require later in life. Oblique aversion therapy to cure us of our thirst for information, and condition us so that thereafter we forge an association between indolence and pleasure. We confuse rebellion with a hairstyle.

And [these days] not just in the red states.

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.

Or at least free to think that we are.

You have waged bitter and undeclared war upon the green, gutting the rain forests, mile after mile, day after day, but know this: the war has come home! It is man's turn to embrace the scythe.

Or so they keep telling us.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.

Unless of course it's even more mysterious than that.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

No, this really can happen.

Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because.

Right, like that will actually work. Well, anyway, it didn't work for me.

We spent our lives making livings.

Clearly, some better than others. Of course, it's all rigged though isn't it?

Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

That will never catch on, right?

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

And this is all before the part about falling over into the abyss that is oblivion.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

Still does.

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

We'll need to know more, of course.

A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn’t find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to this world - this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me.

You either get this or you don't. Pain, it turns out, can be tricky as hell.

I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time.

Gay or straight as it were.

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Enough said?

Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.

Nowadays it's probably a drone.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused.

Unless of course they're a philosopher. Like we are, right?

No peace and security among mankind—let alone common friendship—can ever exist as long as people think that governments get their authority from God and that religion is to be propagated by force of arms.

Now we know it is all about the money.

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.

So, has that finally been settled? For example, once and for all?

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

Especially mine, right? And, believe it or not, not just here.

There are a thousand ways to Wealth, but only one way to Heaven.

Let's see if Don Trump can drain that swamp.

Personal Identity depends on Consciousness not on Substance.

I'd say "bullshit!" but what if it is actually true?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

Analogy: you're the cliffs, dasein's the tide.

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

Yes, yes, I once actually believed that too.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

I can go along with that.

For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

Down here of course God being the least of it.

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

I know, I know: Not you.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.

Not only that, but, down there, they are closer to God.

For whatever you live is life.

After all, what else could it be?

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

Of course that works the same for us too.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.

Yeah, they're still around.

We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

Unless of course might really does make right.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

So, scientifically, does God exist or not?

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

Uh, oh...that can't be good. Right?

There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. … It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.

That's the part here where the "retard" becomes an "asshole".

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory but progress.

In other words, when they finally agree with us. If not the other way around.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

Let's file this one under, "uh, oh".

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

Either that or just shrug and move on.

Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Well, he had to call it something, right?

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.

It's a fucking butcher shop, isn't it?I know, let's ask God.

But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.

Maybe, but nowadays we give it a fright or two.

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

For example, our fair result.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

You know, like the rest of us. Only better.

It's a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.

In other words, funny as in not funny at all.

Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.

Let's make that the rule here too.

You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.

Let alone wear them.

I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.

Unless, of course, you're just being ironic.

...it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking.

Unless perhaps it's God.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.

They do always say that honesty is the best policy.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality...

On the other hand, reality always has been, always is and always will be just what it it. Absolutely or not.

...you’d think my own face would know me...

On the other hand, he thought, why would it want to?

Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs, and when Brad said, What starts to happen? she said hysterically, People starting to come apart.

Margaret has seen too many movies.

Fear and guilt are sisters...

If not identical twins.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

Neurotically as it were. Or, in any event, as it certainly can be.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.

Of course I never even came close then.

Everyone has secrets. It's just a matter of finding out what they are.

That and when to leave them alone.

She went around with the attitude that she would rather be beaten to death than take any shit.

You know, if that's an option for you.

I’ve had many enemies over the years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never engage in a fight you’re sure to lose. On the other hand, never let anyone who has insulted you get away with it. Bide your time and strike back when you’re in a position of strength—even if you no longer need to strike back.

Of course not all of us are Lizbeths.

Armageddon was yesterday, today we have a serious problem.

In other words, it's personal.

Normally seven minutes of another person's company was enough to give her a headache so she set things up to live as a recluse. She was perfectly content as long as people left her in peace. Unfortunately society was not very smart or understanding.

And, more to the point, they far, far, far outnumber you.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.

In other words, in a world of words, no mud.

Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

Actually, this had never once occured to me.

When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russell.'Wow! I said, duly impressed.No, No, said Cooke, It goes further than that. Bertrand Russell knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russell's aunt danced with Napoleon. That's how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that.

I once shook the hand of Nancy Kulp.

You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

Hint: It rhymes with "mysterious ways".

It was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

I suspect we all have our own rendition of this.

Anger fed him and clothed him and he owed it much.

Either anger or rage.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he is watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for second time in the soul of the living.

Pick one: 1] Yes2] No3] Maybe4] All of the above

You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

But I do know. I think.

He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.

My kind of nut.

Nothing had really changed....The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

In that case, nothing really had changed.

The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

Still, some earned it more than others. Or so it seemed to me.

A person can't pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be.

True, but see if that stops most from trying.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the longer the tether of our slavery?

The tethered mind. But isn't that more or less the whole point, Mr. Objectivist?

When everyone drowns and I'm the only one to escape, God is protecting me. When everyone else is saved and I'm the only one to drown, God is protecting me then too.

Yep, that sounds like God alright.

When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream? When, in my rags—without desires—shall I retire contented into the mountains? When, seeing that my body is merely sickness and crime, age and death, shall I—free, fearless, and blissful—retire to the forest? When? When, oh when?

My guess: When it actually becomes an option.

What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.

Well, and shit of course.

I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else! I say: cross, death, kingdom of heaven, God...and what do you understand? Each of you attaches his own suffering, interests and desires to each of these sacred words, and my words disappear, my soul is lost.

Yes, yes I agree: I might well have said that myself.

Let people be, boss; don't open their eyes. And supposing you did, what'd they see? Their misery! Leave their eyes closed, boss, and let them go on dreaming!

Me? Not a chance.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there’s no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true.

Of course not all miseries are created equal.

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I cannot even imagine it. For better or worse as it were.

I realized something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Right?

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

And that's before we get to the actual context.

I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved.

Out of habit if nothing else.

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do. What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down? I said. Alaska frowned. Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.

I know: Let's melt them all down into plowshares.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles